Bridging the Urban Village and the Corporate City: the Social Hub of Boston’S Food Trucks

Bridging the Urban Village and the Corporate City: The Social Hub of Boston’s Food Trucks Senior Honors Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Undergraduate Program in Anthropology Jonathan Anjaria, Advisor In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts by Charlotte Erb April 2014 Copyright by Charlotte Erb Erb 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the staff at Mushu Street Kitchen for welcoming me onto their truck, for training me, and for answering my constant questions. Their patience, openness, and kindness allowed me to fully explore my research questions. I would also like to thank the food truck owners who took the time out of their busy schedules to meet with me and respond honestly to my questions during our in-depth interviews. I am grateful for their contributions to my research, and their willingness to help me understand their perspectives on their work. Finally, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Jonathan Anjaria, for his interest, guidance, and attention in overseeing the completion of this thesis. Thank you to my other readers, Professor Elizabeth Ferry and Professor Laura Miller, for reading drafts, and giving me detailed and intelligent feedback. I am very grateful for the strong support of my thesis committee. Erb 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction: The Intersection of the Urban Village and the Corporate City 4 2. Why Now?: The Rising Popularity of Food Trucks 30 3. “A Human to Human Interaction”: The Social Value of Boston’s Food Trucks 59 4. A Sub-Community: Cooperation Among Boston’s Food Trucks 73 5. Food Trucks and the Creation of Value: Mushu’s Social Mission 85 6. Conclusion: The Future of Food Trucks 95 Bibliography 104 Erb 4 Introduction: The Intersection of the Urban Village and the Corporate City It’s a cold day in February at the Mushu food truck. The service window is closed, and we are preparing for a day of service, posting to our social media sites, cooking, mixing salads, and heating soups and ciders. The food truck generator hums lightly, and music plays in the background. The overhead lights combined with the sunlight coming through the truck’s roof fill the truck with light. This is the warmest part of the shift, when we all enjoy the heat from the grill, despite the bothersome smoke. Although it’s cold, Steve regularly visits our truck every week at the Dewey Square location. He often makes changes to his scallion-pancake sandwiches, replacing the poached- fried eggs with feta cheese or cabbage pickles. Before we begin serving customers, David, the cashier, says that he will be “firing,” (or placing an order), by calling back “Steve.” He says that it will be easier to communicate Steve’s modifications this way, and that Steve will be happy to hear David calling a personal identifier back to the cooks, showing that we all know him well. During service, we bustle around each other in the tight space of the food truck, taking customer orders, preparing salads, and cooking hot sandwiches and soups. Eggs sizzle on the grill, David fires incoming orders (“fire Double! fire Cabbage!”), Caleb calls out customers’ names, plastic bags rustle as we stack hot food containers inside them, and music fills any quiet spaces in between. In the winter, we usually have a fast-paced lunch rush lasting about an hour. As Caleb, our manager, says, “almost everything we do before the shift is to prepare for that lunch rush.” Steve arrives after this rush, and David is able to take the extra time to consider unique sandwich options and modifications with him. David fires “a Steve,” and we busy ourselves with making his order. I appear in the service window to deliver Steve’s sandwich, and he immediately asks, “who are you? I don’t know you yet.” He then introduces himself, and makes Erb 5 an effort to remember my name. Now every time Steve comes back, we know each other, if at least by face, and greet each other with a “nice to see you.” We often hear “Nice to see you,” or “Hey how’ve you been?” on the truck – Mushu employees build and maintain their relationships with customers each day that they “go out” to serve lunch. And since food trucks like Mushu are mobile, this kind of contact often happens right in the heart of Boston’s downtown areas. These trucks are small in size and in character – but their small quality is exactly what allows them to provide their creative meals to the eager office workers who await them. The mobility of the trucks allows them to pay for a parking spot in high-rent areas rather than a storefront. Many of the urban areas that now welcome food trucks have long since pushed out small mom and pop businesses that could not afford the high rents. Gourmet food trucks bring back a local, small-business presence that these bustling urban areas had been lacking. In the past decade, these local food trucks have taken Boston by storm, their numbers rising from only 13 trucks in 2012 to an estimated 56 trucks last year (Marrs 2013). This dramatic growth in the food truck industry has coincided with a shift in urban governance towards reestablishing Boston’s image as a tech-savvy, innovative, fun city. How have food trucks contributed to this new image? What is the relationship between food trucks and larger efforts to rebrand Boston? What are the ethical implications of their involvement in these efforts? What do they bring to the city’s public spaces? What ideologies and associations do they bring with them? Who benefits from their new presence, and who suffers? And what are the social effects of food trucks in Boston’s communities? While food trucks appear to be simply “a fun way to get your food,” (Mitchell 2014), they are also involved in many other urban issues including urban renewal and rebranding, place-making, urban social networks, and social justice. Erb 6 The “Urban Village” Jane Jacobs describes a similar kind of intimacy between business owners and neighborhood residents in New York’s West Village in the 1960s. She wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, partially as a response to Robert Moses’s plans to build a 10- lane elevated highway through New York City’s Washington Square Park (Beauman 2011). She protests this potentially destructive change to her West Village neighborhood and other working class communities by calling attention to the social minutiae and daily practices occurring on the ground in New York City rather than large-scale ideas of cities. Jacobs praises the natural daily life of urban neighborhoods, argues against traditional, archaic urban planning techniques, and revisits the actual uses and effects of common urban spaces such as sidewalks and parks (Jacobs 1961). She describes the daily routines of her neighbors as an “intricate sidewalk ballet” – young students walk by eating candy, shopkeepers open locks and prepare for business, businessmen and women carry briefcases, housewives pause to chat, taxis come and go (Jacobs 1961: 50). In doing so, Jacobs highlights the intricate social web of urban communities. In other words, Jacobs “emphasized the authentic human contacts made possible by the city’s old and unplanned messiness” (Zukin 2010: 12). Where Jacobs defines the necessary social characteristics of urban living among her working class neighbors, Gans emphasizes the ethnic group dynamics of the Italian-American community in Boston’s West End. A sociologist and urban planning researcher, Gans coined the phrase “urban village” to describe the Italian-American working-class district in the West End, where he conducted his fieldwork. In the early 1960s, Gans was devastated to find that Boston would relocate the district during slum clearance. This slum clearance was part of a large movement in cities across the United States to “clean up” urban centers when many upper and Erb 7 middle class Americans left cities for the suburbs (The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy 2005). The prevailing opinion at the time was that these “slums” were unhealthy blights and eyesores in American cities, and that they should be removed in order to make way for more attractive – or upper and middle class – venues. These neighborhoods, however, often had value that urban planners and governments could not and did not see. The displaced Italian-Americans in the West End, for example, had formed an ethnic community founded strongly in family values and close personal ties in their social groups. The highly personal and social contacts that their community relied and thrived on prompted Herbert Gans to think of an urban village – an area in which the inhabitants “try to adapt their nonurban institutions and cultures to the urban milieu (Gans 1982: 4). The urban village is therefore, by Gans’s definition, a community largely based on interdependence and social connection. As one contemporary urban sociologist puts it: “…the term village was…unhitched from its rural connotations. Transported to the central city, it became a signifier of community spirit in a heterogeneous yet socially integrated neighbourhood, a Sesame Street for grown-ups, a place, in the words of the theme song for the TV show Cheers, 'where everybody knows your name'" (Whitzman 2009: 52). Interested in Jacobs and Gans’s “urban villages,” city planners now attempt to reconstruct the vibrancy of such neighborhoods in mixed-use zoning areas. As urban populations rise and cities gentrify, planners work to devise new ways to solve common urban difficulties – in this case, the separation of commercial and residential spaces.

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